Yes, I'm Scotty :-) .
I professionally learned assembly language on the PDP-11 which was a beautifully designed CPU by Gordon Bell -- simple and elegant. ( Correction, I first did programming on a Burroughs 220 and Control Data 1604 at Cornell where I had the run of the enormous computer room at night -- but that dates me to the mid 60's . ) The Motorola 6809 and 68000 were also inspired. Then came Intel, who never could tolerate simplicity and made everything, hardware and software unbelievably and uselessly complicated ( I sense the designers came from the academic community. ) . My favorite architecture is the PowerPC from IBM, but the non-volatile FRAM devices ( MSP430FR from TI ) hail back to the old magnetic core memory days which was also non-volatile, and the MSP430's have quite a decent instruction set to boot (pun not intended). Hoyt Stearns Scottsdale, Arizona US From: Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson [mailto:orionwo...@charter.net] Sent: Friday, September 4, 2015 7:58 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:Subject: FORTH computer language Fun stuff there, Hoyt and Eric. Hoyt, are you "Scotty?" This brings up my early university studies of learning assembly language. Assembly & Machine language programming is another lost art within the computer science field. Few universities teach assembly language these days. That concerns me. Most programmers these days have no clue whatsoever as to what happens at the machine level. I must confess learning assembly language for me had initially been excruciatingly difficult. It took a part-time McDonald's swing manager sitting me down during an evening break and explaining a fundamental machine language principle that had completely baffled me. Initially, I didn't understand the fact that instructions AND data could be stored interchangeably in the same locations of core memory. Once I understand the utter simplicity of that paradigm, there was no holding me back. Back then when I was a UW Madison student, I was working at a McDonalds store that catered to the lunch break of the University crowd. The swing manager who had obviously taken some CS courses, and who was instrumental in getting me to understand a major fundamental CS principal about low-level programming concepts, was himself a psychology major. Go figure. I hope he's doing well. He sure was helpful in straightening out some of my CS confusions. Back then few beginning computer students had access to programming in an assembly language environment. Granted, there were a lot of PDP mini computers installed in the CS building, but you had to be a more advanced CS student in order to gain access to them and the machine instruction set. Those were 400+ level courses. For the masses: Fortran, Algol and Pascal were the rage. ... and nobody talked about COBOL. After all, the computer science department was an academic institution, not a business establishment. Of course, in my case, it was learning COBOL at Madison Area Technical College (located at the other side of town;-) ) that got me a good paying job that ultimately lasted 36 years working for the state of Wisconsin till I retired last December. CS students learned assembly language by initially practicing with Donald's Knuth's MIX language. MIX was an elegant representation of a simulation of assembly language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIX I had a lot of fun learning how to program within a simulated core of 4k memory. MIX taught me how to be efficient in both compacting the size of my programs as well as making them execute quickly. In one contest I came in 2nd best for designing a program that was both the fastest as well as taking up as few machine instructions as possible within core memory. The class was assigned the task of adding up Fibonacci numbers. Someone in the class figured out how to do the same function with one less machine instruction than my program. I wish I had found out who that person was. I would have loved to have compared notes. These days I use Microsoft Visual Studio Profession - 2013. I'll probably upgrade to 2015 or later version reasonably soon. My Kepler project is being written primarily in C#. It's a decent language. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson OrionWorks.com zazzle.com/orionworks --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com
